Each year $400 billion in personal and business taxes are left uncollected due to inadequate enforcement capacity. Hiring more IRS auditors is both good policy and good politics, writes Jack Metzgar in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their recent book American Amnesia report that for every dollar spent on tax law enforcement the government gets $6 in additional revenue – and even better, if the new auditors were told to focus on high-income groups where most outright fraud and evasion occurs, the return is $47 for each $1 spent on hiring tax collectors. To hire 50,000 new IRS workers to focus on getting the rich to pay what they legally owe, I figure, might cost about $3.5 billion but could produce some $150 billion in new revenue. Why wouldn’t we do that?

With that additional revenue, the government could invest in a 10-year infrastructure program like the one Bernie Sanders wants, including investments in producing and installing green energy technology. This would create 1.3 million jobs a year, mostly in manufacturing and construction. Why wouldn’t we do that?

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

In Australia, dog racing provides both entertainment and jobs to working-class people, yet the practice is also rife with cruelty and abuse. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Sarah Attfield explores the tension between working-class culture and the ethics of such customs.

Although class is not generally discussed in Australia in an explicit way, those in power sometimes acknowledge class differences and use them to justify or sell a particular policy. Suddenly, the working class exists and is under siege by the elites. Australians generally dislike snobbery, so suggesting that the ban reflects elite scorn for working-class activities is a clever tactic. But such arguments hide the wealth tied up in the industry and the money made through gambling. Most of the big players in the greyhound industry are not ‘battlers’.

It is true though that greyhound racing has been a working-class pastime. Some working-class people keep a couple of dogs and race them as a hobby. I’m sure many of these dogs are much loved and well looked after, and they are not necessarily euthanized when they stop being successful on the track. But the cruelty within the industry is systemic, and individual dog owners doing the right thing doesn’t counter the widespread abuse of the animals. And even the most diligent owner can’t prevent dogs from being injured during races or training.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

As the Republican National Convention wraps up in Cleveland, John Russo explores why Hillary Clinton could lose working-class voters in Ohio and what she would need to do in order to win. The piece originally appeared in The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) on June 26, 2016.

In Ohio, about 60 percent of voters in 2012 did not have a college degree, one of the most commonly used (though problematic) proxies for identifying working-class voters. Slightly more than half of them voted for Obama, according to CNN exit polls. But while Obama won a majority of working-class votes in Ohio, he lost among whites, winning only 41 percent of their votes. This suggests that a significant portion of Obama’s working-class support in 2012 came from Ohio voters of color, not white voters. Four years later, the combination of white working-class support for Trump, as we saw in the primary, and expected lower African-American turnout — Clinton is unlikely to inspire the enthusiasm that Obama generated — may swing Ohio’s prized electoral votes to the presumptive Republican nominee.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

Recent regulations help consumers hire lawyers, defend against lawsuits, and win favorable decisions in court against big businesses and corporations. In Working-Class Perspectives, attorney Marc Dann breaks down how Dodd-Frank and the federal agency it birthed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, help working-class people get justice.

These laws, regulations, and rulings create financial incentives for private attorneys and consumers to take on big banks and predatory lenders. Those incentives include forcing financial firms to pay the attorney fees of consumers who have been wronged, eliminating forced arbitration clauses that make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for lawyers to file class action suits against the bad actors in the financial services industry, and making it possible for borrowers to collect significant monetary damages from lenders who violate their rights.

Much like the contingency fee system and class action suits that improved auto safety, forced pharmaceutical companies to remove dangerous drugs from the market place, and held polluters accountable for damaging the environment, the new rules and regulations make it economically feasible for private attorneys to grapple with the teams of high-paid lawyers who represent banks and other lenders. That will bring much needed stability and accountability to the nation’s consumer credit market.

The renowned Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

The world is still reverberating from last week’s Brexit referendum. The leave campaign won largely because it appealed to the anxiety and frustration of British working-class voters. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Tim Strangleman argues that those who campaigned in favor of the UK’s membership in the EU misread the political landscape by failing to address the grievances of the working class.

A number of commentators have understood the class resentment underlying the referendum. In his thoughtful video blogs preceding the vote, Guardian journalist John Harris travelled away from the ‘Westminster village’ to the more marginal, often over looked parts of the UK. What he observed was precisely this class demographic of voting intentions, people who were in effect members of what sociologist Guy Standing has called the precariat. Fellow Guardian columnist Ian Jack wrote a similarly powerfully reflective piece linking the working-class vote with deindustrialisation. Both Harris and Jack emphasize the point that for unskilled workers with only a secondary school education, three decades or more of neo-liberalism has left deep scars socially, politically, and culturally, with little hope or expectation that anything would change for the better. In avox pop radio interview the day before the referendum, a person stopped for their views simply said, ‘The working class is going to get screwed whether we stay or leave, so we might as well leave’.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors.

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Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.Learn more